Fast growth by a firm often can lead to conflict with its competitors over market shares. This conflict impacts on the growth rate of the firm as well as on industry structure. The nature of these impacts depends on the competitive strategies adopted by the firm and its competitors. Alternative patterns of strategies are identified and analyzed, including patterns associated with Schumpeter’s t...

This paper describes a study of a simple open learner model that can be optionally released to peers in named or anonymous form, to facilitate collaborative and competitive learning in a situation where the learner model contents contributed to students' assessment. Results suggest that, under the right conditions, students may start working sooner; discussion amongst students can be increased;...

Most developed countries exhibit high rates of R&D performed in industry, but the situation is considerable different in medium income countries such as Portugal. Despite the lower levels of R&D, Portuguese firms have increased their competitiveness, and the country has been able to show remarkable levels of economic performance. This paper provides a framework to analyze the way in which R&D i...

Mining local structure is important in data analysis. Gaussian mixture is able to describe local structure through the covariance matrices, but when used on highdimensional data, fitly specifying such a large number of d(d + 1)=2 free elements in each covariance matrix is difficult. In this paper, by constraining the covariance matrix in decomposed orthonormal form, we propose a Local PCA algor...

SU9516 is a 3-substituted indolinone compound with demonstrated potent and selective inhibition toward cyclin dependent kinases (cdks). Here, we describe the kinetic characterization of this inhibition with respect to cdk2, 1, and 4, along with the crystal structure in complex with cdk2. The molecule is competitive with respect to ATP for cdk2/cyclin A, with a K(i) value of 0.031 microM. Simila...

The 5' untranslated region (UTR) of cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) RNA 4 confers a highly competitive translational advantage on a heterologous luciferase open reading frame. Here we investigated whether secondary structure in the 5' UTR contributes to this translational advantage. Stabilization of the 5' UTR RNA secondary structure inhibited competitive translational activity. Alteration of a pot...

Article history: Received 5 April 2015 Received in revised form 30 May 2015 Accepted 2 June 2015 Available online 9 June 2015 Communicated by D.-Z. Du

Competition, despite its potential drawbacks, is an easily adopted and frequently used motivator in classrooms. Individual abilities, in the years of schooling, are inevitably different, and performance in competition is heavily ability dependent, resulting that more-able students always win while less-able students always lose. Students easily perceive how well they perform through the result ...

We prove a lower bound ρ ≥ 9.001 for the competitive ratio of the so-called online matching problem on a line. As a consequence, the online matching problem is revealed to be strictly more difficult than the “cow problem”.